


there is only one of us

by appleheart



Series: LoZ Music Shuffle Prompts [2]
Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Genre: F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Pre-Canon, Reincarnation, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-13 00:40:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4501170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/appleheart/pseuds/appleheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ganondorf is alive, but alone. The country he meant to keep is underwater, and the princess he meant to love has not been reincarnated. (WW-specific.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	there is only one of us

**Author's Note:**

> Done for a music shuffle prompt. [notaduckling](http://notaduckling.tumblr.com) requested "ZelGan" and the shuffle turned up Bike For Three's "There Is Only One Of Us."

He has been cast upon the dead shores of an empty world.

He cannot say with any confidence how much time has passed, or tally up all that has changed. Sometimes he questions whether this cold ocean is Hyrule at all. Whether this is a prank of the gods who hate him. Whether this is yet another eddying nightmare of his long imprisonment, this time one of sunlight and false hope. The sense of abandonment and betrayal is the same, after all.

(At these times, there is nothing for it but to stare down and down into the waves.)

What he does know for sure is this: she is gone, and he is alone here.

He is certain of this, although when he closes his eyes, he can almost smell the jasmine perfume of her hair. When he sleeps, he jolts awake, convinced he has heard her light tread on the threshold.

But he knows the fence between wishful thinking and madness. The sundered Triforce makes a pale scar on the back of his hand. Incomplete, isolated, it holds no spark of life. Its dullness mocks him: marked for power, yet powerless. And alone.

He almost wishes he could cross that fence again, and take solace in hallucination. The gods withhold that small mercy from him. He faces this bleak world of doubts and solitude, utterly sane.

He searches for her with magic, with ships, with polite queries and furious demands. He sends hunters to find her and bring her back to him. They do not know whom they seek; there are no princesses above these waves. (The only ones lie drowned beneath them, with coral fingers tracing their ribs and sandy kisses filling up their mouths.)

Nor can he describe her to them. He has always known her, has never failed to know her, though she has worn a hundred guises in their time: golden-haired and dark, priestess and warrior, child and queen, tall and short and sunburnt and alabaster. The qualities he remembers as constant are the ones which he cannot impart to his dull-minded, indifferent servants. The scent of her hair, the rueful smile she has always saved for him alone. And is even he certain of that, anymore? She exists only in the vault of his mind. Perhaps he has lost the key.

All he can tell them is that she will be Hylian, that she will be the essence of Hyrule itself.

That name means nothing to them.

He sighs, and tells them to search for women with long, pointed ears.

Regardless, they do not find her, and the years go on.


End file.
